Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War – 20 – Impure Imagination

Stern Ritter “V” Gwenael Lee interrupts Isane’s healing of Muguruma and Rose, and Yachiru’s slash-first, ask-questions-later approach seems to be ill-advised, as Gwnael is able to mask his existence from her sight, touch, and even memory. However, Yachiru doesn’t have to rely on any of those things to score a hit on her opponent: she can use instinct alone, a “tingle” Kenny told her to trust.

Yachiru draws her sword for the first time, revealing her Shikai, Sanpo Kenju. It take the form of two big fluffy buddies copying her every move, such that the more an opponent tries to gauge distance and timing, the more they misjudge it and get struck by one of her synchronized blades.

It’s pretty damn cool, and Yachiru drawing her sword and demonstrating some of her true power has been a long time coming. Unfortunately, while it seems to be enough to defeat Gwenael, he turns out to be nothing but a figment of the imagination of the real Stern Ritter “V”—Gremmy Thoumeaux (voiced by Tanjirou himself, Hanae Natsuki).

Called the “Visionary”, anything Gremmy imagines becomes reality, whether it was Gwenael Lee (whom he un-imagines when he’s beaten) or something absurd, like Yachiru’s bones turning into cookies. Anyone else would have been screaming in pain, but Yachiru is made of sterner stuff. Still, with cookie bones she’s essentially at Gremmy’s mercy.

She and Isane are bailed out by the return of Zaraki Kenpachi. He gravely informs Isane that Captian Unohana is dead and he killed her, but Isane doesn’t seem to harbor any ill will. In fact, knowing Zaraki rightfully succeeded Unohana’s Kenpachi title brings tears to her eyes.

Gremmy uses his imagination to build a venue suitable for his battle with one of Soul Society’s strongest. He blocks Zaraki’s first strike by imagining his skin is stronger than steel, but of course Zaraki’s blade can cut steel. He tells Gremmy, with perfect confidence, that his “puny” imagination can’t create anything he can’t cut.

Gremmy accepts that challenge, and the mayhem commences.

Gremmy declares he’ll kill Zaraki not even with one finger, but only with his mind. He summons flame, but Zaraki cuts through it. He conjures a cube of water around Zaraki that follows him as he rescues Yachiru from falling to her death, then has the stone fortress close around him. But again, Zaraki slashes through.

When Zaraki puts it to Gremmy that if he considers himself the strongest Quincy, doesn’t he want to crush the strongest Shinigami? That’s when, for the first timy, Gremmy actually has the desire to kill someone: Zaraki. He conjures hundreds of guns, but all the bullets hit is stone Zaraki kicks up. He conjures missiles, but Zaraki slices through them.

Then Gremmy splits himself into two Gremmies, which he says gives him double the imaginative power—which he uses to conjure a damn meteor.

He also imagines that he can no longer be killed, but even if Zaraki manages to do so, he can’t stop the reality of the meteor bearing down on Soul Society. When it impacts, nothing will be left but Gremmy. But yet again, he doesn’t get it: anything he imagines, Zaraki can cut. Befitting Zaraki’s squad number, this battle is taken to 11.

He unleashes his Nozarashi’s Shikai and cleaves the meteor clean in two, which is an extremely cool sight to see. Even then, Gremmy decides to ditch matter altogether and open a pocket to outer space, and casts Zaraki into the vacuum. Unfortunately for Gremmy, Nozarashi can cut through the fabric of space.

Gremmy then switches to what looks like the power of blue giant stars to blast Zaraki to smithereens, but his blade continues to cut through all. Gremmy calls him a monster, and inadvertently imagines that he is one in reality. While that is pretty much the reality anyway, the key fact is that Gremmy got lost in and undone by the logic of his powers.

As he decorporealizes, revealing his true form as an inert brain in a jar, Gremmy admits defeat, as only Zaraki’s body, not the body he had imagined for himself, can withstand Zaraki’s powers. He may be gone but thanks to Hanae Natsuki and one all-timer of a battle with Zaraki, he won’t be soon forgotten.

Tokyo 24th Ward Dropped

Somewhere between the far-fetched lightning episode, the flashback episode that didn’t move the story forward, and the show not airing at all last week, I lost interest in this show. The first half of this episode did nothing to re-spark that interest.

The ham-fisted political commentary now dominates everything, leaving our characters nothing but pawns darting across a breakneck plot while two bad guys on opposite ends of the spectrum weave their respective webs. I’d have preferred more of RGB solving trolley dilemmas interspersed with slice-of-city-life moments of earlier episodes.

Tokyo 24th Ward – 09 – Sowing and Reaping

You said it, Cowboy Man. Nothing like a prequel three quarters into a show to kill the momentum. RGB, who flailed around independently last week during an improbably destructive thunderstorm. Rather than follow up on those events, we flash back to 1999, when Kanae was still working on autonomous driving tech with her colleague Kuchikiri.

When a car drives into their lane, the AI overrides Kanae’s steering so that Kuchikiri is seriously injured while Kanae and a pedestrian, a young Tsuzuragawa, are spared. When Kuchikiri comes to he finds himself unable to read words or numbers properly, and decides to reinvent himself with the name “Kuchikiri” now looks like to his eyes: 0th.

Kanae, who had just struck a business deal with Suidou Gouri, eventually becomes his wife and the mother of his kids…but the episode isn’t interested in explaining exactly how these two people with zero chemistry fell in love. But hey, Tsuzuragawa, guilty over what happened with 0th, decides to follow in Kanae’s footsteps even as Kanae abandons her research. Tsuzuragawa also meets Chikushi at college, where he once exhibited the same wannabe hero qualities as Shuuta (which explains his present-day cynicism).

Kanae also sets up the Takara Food Bank with the shopping district, which is how her kids Asumi and Kouki meet Shuuta and Ran. But while she’s chasing after someone asking if they need help, she ends up robbed and stabbed to death. Chikushi came between her and the first slash, but couldn’t stop the second. Gouri’s kids watch their dad break down for the first time in their lives, and I daresay he transformed into a different person in that hospital that night.

Determined to prevent crimes like the one that claimed his wife, Gouri turns to Tsuzuragawa to dust off Kanae’s research and complete it; the beginnings of what would become the KANAE System in the present. Tsuzuragawa probably knows right then and there that if Kanae couldn’t perfect the tech, she doesn’t have a prayer, but presses on anyway out of guilt and obligation.

Where Tsuzuragawa finds time to do this research while acting as chauffeur and personal assistant to the Suidou family is unclear, but as the years pass Gouri turns the resurrected Cornucopia Project as the cornerstone of both his mayoral campaign and his bid for the 24th Ward to join Tokyo. When 0th hears about this, he wants to fight Gouri, and I can’t blame him. Kanae’s tech was flawed and she knew it, but he’s going to use it anyway?

Perhaps too conveniently for the completion of Gouri’s descent, Tsuzuragawa is unable to make the system work without a human brain at its core, and as you’d expect, you can’t buy living brains on Rakuten. But when Asumi is severely injured at the school fire, Gouri decides to turn her into the 24th Ward’s “Guardian Angel”, which even for him feels like too large a leap to Super-villainy.

Ultimately, while this flashback episode colored in some of the broad strokes and made some connections regarding the adult characters of the show, the fact remains RGB are still flailing about in the present day, with one less episode for them to figure shit out. Meanwhile, Gouri’s monstrous decision was decidedly not justified here, while Tsuzuragawa comes off as the misguided protégé. The grown-ups have left a big mess for the kids to clean up!

P.S. Episode 10 is delayed; a recap episode is airing this week.

Tokyo 24th Ward – 06 – A Sacrifice Too Far

RGB’s latest mission fails utterly as a collaborative effort, with Ran and Kouki going off in their own directions while Shuuta parkours aimlessly around a cruise ship. It ends with Kunai being shot to death and Kouki about to bring Ran in for questioning before he’s rescued by his DoRed buddies, whom he tells how Kunai was set up by the bigwigs.

Kouki is convinced there was no outcome in which Kunai could be saved, but in any case feels like there’s far too many similarities between Aumi’s visions and Hazard Cast, to the point that he directly tells his dad, in earshot of his assistants, that his dead sister has been calling him asking to guide the future. His dad tells him not to dwell on the past.

No sooner does he say this than a ghost appears on the news—a video recording Kunai made in the eventuality of his death or capture. He reveals his role in developing the Di-Va app meant to help people that the powers that be acquired and corrupted into a virtual drug with the explicit purpose of making Shantytown enough of a mess so as to make it a target for development.

He ends his message by making it clear that DoRed, to which he belonged, had no role in his actitivites; he acted alone, and wants everyone who doesn’t want to be crushed under the heel of The Man to support DoRed in any way they can. DoRed will need all the help they can get, as Kouki’s dad takes him to the top-secret area of the Information Center we’ve been seeing in fits and spurts.

Shuuta, out of the loop as usual but armed with bags of bread crusts, reaches out first to Ran, who is convinced Kouki will sell him and DoRed out, and then Kouki at the ruins of the old school (about to be demolished). The crusts remind Kouki of old and simpler times, and his first interaction with Ran, which was to catch him for stealing apples (Asumi spotted he crime first, but didn’t rat Ran out).

When Kouki meets the kids Ran was trying to feed with the apples, he questions whether he did the right thing. His mother Kanae assures him he did, but the world isn’t perfect, and sometimes some rules have to bent or broken to do the truly right thing. All anyone can do is keep thinking about what is right together.

Kouki’s dad has determined that the right thing to do is to create a system even more invasive than Hazard Cast, which he unveils to the Ward on TV as the KANAE system, named after his wife (who would have surely had many problems with it). Basically a PreCrime system, Shuuta is right to hesitate to update his phone to the preliminary version, even as others around him quickly make the choice that one tap of their phone is a small price to pay for enhanced safety and security

Obviously, they won’t know the real cost until it bites them in the collective ass. And then there’s the CPU that makes KANAE function: Asumi’s desecrated corpse and its still functional brain. This development has been teased for a while now, but I’m surprised by how quickly Kouki goes along with his clearly evil father.

So much so, in fact, that I wonder if he’s only going along with it so he can remain in the thick of things, where he can best put a stop to this before it gets out of hand. Then again, he may have made the choice that the sacrifice of his sister’s dignity and the personal freedoms of the Ward are worth the peace and order that will result. If that’s the case, RGB truly is history.

Ex-Arm – 01 (First Impressions) – NOPE

Nope. Nope Nope Nope.

NOPE.

OverLord – 10

News from Albedo that “Shalltear has revolted” was definitely a nice stab to end last week’s battle with Clementine and Khajit, and left me with a complex response. On the one hand, if it’s true that Shalltear revolted, it means this world is a lot more dangerous than had been apparent thus far.

But if Albedo was simply overreacting based on her latent dislike of and rivalry with the vampiress, it still speaks to a trend of internal court strife that started out playful and harmless but could spell big trouble, even for the Supreme Lord.

I’m pleased, then, that the actually answer to the question of what happened with Shalltear fell somewhere between those two possibilities, with qualities of both.

I’m also pleased that OverLord’s quality of storytelling did not falter greatly just because Momonga was out of the picture for the vast majority of the episode. He’s a powerful, dominant presence both in the world and show, so his absence, while felt, was mitigated by giving us a closer look at Shalltear, including her downright frightening “attack” form.

Like Albedo and Narbarel, she looks about as far down as humans as one can, but goes further, looking upon them as food, or, at best, an entertaining “playmate.” But someone who considers humans even more as mere food and toys is the accompanying maid Solution, who is beautiful and seductive, but in reality is a shape-shifting slime monster whose boobs turn into a mouth that swallows a hapless dolt whole.

But interestingly, it’s not a total cakewalk for Shalltear & Co., at least not as much as it was for other Nazarickians thus far. Shalltear not only comes across the redhead to whom Momon gave a red potion (which she uses to save herself), but a well-coordinated force of NPCs manages to hold off a few of Shalltear’s attacks, and may or may not have taken temporary control of her mind.

It’s that event, and its registry on the master screen, that causes Albedo to suspect a revolt. We can be reasonably clear she’s mistaken, however, and that the reality is more complicated; another mystery Momonga has to figure out with that big bony head of his. I appreciate the nuance of the situation, which is far more interesting than if Shalltear had suddenly decided to rebel against the lord she’s always loved (long before Momonga altered Albedo’s personality to love him), which would be way out of character.

And that’s also something the show keeps present in our own heads: the (anti-)heroes of Nazarick who serve Lord Ains Ooal Gown are the product and offspring of their creators, “supreme beings” like Ains who just happened to also be his friends (at least friends within the game, if not outside of it in the “real world”). As such, aside from his love hack of Albedo which was his doing, everyone who serves Momonga is acting in accordance with the parameters set by their creators, i.e. those friends of his.

So if it was Shalltear’s creator’s will that she revolt against Ains, so be it…but neither I nor Momonga are willing to concede that absent further information. For now, he simply has to find Shalltear…and hope whatever she has doesn’t spread to his other generals.